How to Find Cocktails You Can Make with Ingredients You Already Have on Difford's Guide

Use the Cocktail Finder to filter recipes by the ingredients you own, or use the "What can you make tonight?" tool, which takes what's in your bar and shows matching cocktails. Both are free to browse; an account is needed to save recipes and build lists, and some content sits behind the site's Premium membership.

Start with the "What can you make tonight?" tool

This is the fastest route when you have a handful of bottles and no plan.

1. Open the tool from the homepage prompt: "What can you make tonight? Tell us what's in your bar and we'll show you the cocktails you can make!"
2. Enter the ingredients you actually have — spirits, liqueurs, mixers, juices, syrups, and fresh items like citrus or egg white.
3. Review the results. The site matches your list against its recipe database (22,700 recipes, per the site) and returns cocktails you can make.
4. Check each recipe's full ingredient list before you commit — a match may still call for a garnish or a small quantity of something you don't have.

Expected result: a shortlist of drinks buildable from your current stock, rather than a list you have to cross-check by hand.

Common snag: if you enter too few ingredients, results will be thin; if you enter items you don't really have, you'll get recipes you can't finish. Enter only what's on the shelf.

Use the Cocktail Finder filters

The Cocktail Finder is the broader search: "Find the perfect cocktail by ingredient, style, rating, bartender and more."

• By ingredient — the most direct filter for your situation. Select the spirit or modifier you want to use up and narrow from there.
• By style — useful when you know the occasion (e.g., a stirred, spirit-forward drink versus something long and fizzy).
• By rating — sort toward drinks other users rate highly, which helps when you're choosing between several matches.
• By bartender — for when you want a specific creator's take rather than a generic recipe.

How to verify a match: open the recipe and read the method and glassware as well as the ingredients. A drink that matches on paper may need a shaker, a specific glass, or 20 minutes of prep.

Browse by ingredient and easy-build collections

If you'd rather explore than search, the site's curated entry points do the filtering for you:

The 3 Ingredient Cocktails and Cocktails Made Easy sections are the practical choice when your bar is sparse — fewer ingredients means a higher chance you already own everything.

Save what works and build a repeatable list

Once you find drinks you can make, keep them so you don't repeat the search:

• Create an account (Log in / Join) to use personal collections.
• Add recipes to Collections and mark them Favourites, Tried & Liked, or Must Try.
• Use Cabinets to record your preferred brands and custom ingredients — this makes future matching more accurate to what you actually stock.
• Rate recipes so your own list reflects what you'd make again.

Expected result: a personal shortlist of buildable drinks that grows as your bar does.

Note on access: the site shows a Premium membership option, and some content is labelled Early Access Content. Browsing and searching are available without it, but don't assume every feature or recipe is open — check the membership page if you hit a restriction.

A practical routine

For a bar of, say, gin, sweet vermouth, Campari, and lemon: run the "What can you make tonight?" tool with those four, then cross-check the results in the Cocktail Finder filtered by gin. You'll land on classics like a Negroni or a gin sour variant, each with a full method — and you'll know before you start whether you need to buy anything.